After Protest Video, U.S. Envoy’s Name Censored Online

China’s Internet censors have blocked searches for the Chinese name of Jon Huntsman, the U.S. Ambassador to China, on popular microblogging sites after a video and photos were posted online of him appearing outside a McDonald’s in Beijing where activists had urged people to start a “Jasmine Revolution” in China.

Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Jon Huntsman speaks next to U.S. President Barack Obama after accepting the nomination to be the new United States Ambassador to China, at the White House in Washington, May 16, 2009.

You can still search for Mr Huntsman’s name in English on Sina Weibo and other popular micro-blogging sites, but searches for his Chinese name “Hong Bopei” on Sina Weibo produced a message saying: “According to the relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results cannot be shown.”

On Tencent's QQ Weibo, a search for Mr. Huntsman's Chinese name led users to his personal microblogging account but otherwise turned up no results, only a message saying: “Comments relating to Hong Bopei could not be found.”

The video of Mr Huntsman outside the McDonald’s in Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping district – one of 13 sites where an anonymous online appeal urged people to protest last Sunday – appears to have originally been posted on m4.cn, a “youth thought portal” the Chinese media-watching site Danwei says is linked to the nationalistic website anti-cnn.com.

Fashioned in the sledgehammer-to-the-forehead style common to anti-cnn.com, the video shows Mr. Huntsman in a brown leather jacket and sunglasses standing on the edge of the crowd outside the McDonald’s and being interrogated in Chinese about his presence there by a person who has been blurred out. After Mr. Huntsman leaves, the video cuts to a series of proclamations outlined in explosive red bubbles: “We don’t want to become Iraq! We don’t want to become Tunisia! We don’t want to become Egypt!”

A version with somewhat misleading subtitles has been posted on YouTube (for a more accurate sense of what Mr. Huntsman said to his interlocutor, see the Shanghaiist’s translation here).

The U.S. Embassy earlier told China Real Time that Mr Huntsman’s appearance at the scene was coincidental: He knew nothing of the protest appeal and happened to be walking through the area on a family outing. It says he left as soon as he realized what was going on, although he later returned to check the situation. Screenshots from the video clearly show Gracie Mae, Mr. Huntsman’s adopted Chinese daughter, standing next to her father outside the McDonald’s.

The notion that Mr. Huntsman simply dropped-by to see what the commotion was about has not flown with nationalistic Chinese bloggers, some of whom accuse him of either trying to undermine the Chinese government or to promote himself for a possible U.S. presidential bid in 2012.